


Love, Necromancy, Cocks, and the Reanimated Corpse of Compulsory Heterosexuality: Watching Notes for 14x06

by dimplesofdiscontent



Series: Season 14 Meta [2]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: 13x12, 14x06, Meta, Season/Series 14, Season/Series 14 Speculation, Season/Series 14 Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-23
Updated: 2018-12-23
Packaged: 2019-09-25 06:10:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,603
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17115923
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dimplesofdiscontent/pseuds/dimplesofdiscontent
Summary: Notes and analysis for Supernatural episode 14x06, "Optimism." Originally posted on Tumblr on November 15, 2018.Tumblr tags: rambly thoughts, watching notes, meta adjacent, but tagging this as, 14x06 meta, my meta, 14x06, dean is bi, spn and sexuality meta, meta, doubles and mirrors, villains as exposition, jack the nephilim, parental unit dean, dadstiel, by implication, love and love, use ALL the tropes, and indeed twist those tropes, performing!dean, was pretty absent, season what do you want 14, toxic masculinity ruins the party again, spn and masculinity, dean feels, season 14 speculation, long post for ts, spn spoilers, 13x12





	Love, Necromancy, Cocks, and the Reanimated Corpse of Compulsory Heterosexuality: Watching Notes for 14x06

Oh my goodness this episode was pure fucking delight!! Is there a member of the NextGen writers’ room who  _isn’t_  binging wall-to-wall fanfic as inspiration? I mean, this even began as a library AU for crying out loud! I love these people and I love what they’re doing and they managed to do something I thought was impossible…not mind that this is our third episode in a row without Cas. We even got a nice lil’ shoutout to meta writers as Sam illustrated for Charlie why she was like the flyman and she gently insisted that, although Sam did have a point, she was not, to be clear, actually the same as flyman. (This will not stop me from proceeding with my flyman-type readings though. But thanks, Yockey!)

So obviously this was an episode about love and….love as we could tell from the tagline, “the things we do for love” and the title, “Optimism.” I’m sorry to say, though, that I ended up feeling that both those things were a setup for some very dark times indeed that are a-comin’! *rocks chair* *sips moonshine* We just learned from the PR that 14x08 will be an episode in which Cas makes an “enormous sacrifice.” And, well, there are only a few options for that at this point. I’ll talk more about it in a sec, but I think “the things we do for love” is pretty clear foreshadowing of not precisely what he’ll do but why he’ll do it. 

So anyway, here are some bullet-point-type rambles about things I noticed immediately post-episode. If I have time I might get to expand on them but, the way my time has been lately, it’s a lot more likely that they’ll stay rambly and informal. Still, feel free to pick up and toss around/expand on whatever appeals!

**Necromancers - it’s not real love if it’s dead** : I [reblogged](https://dimples-of-discontent.tumblr.com/post/180157978306/was-this-episode-various-and-sundry-villains-pt) the lovely [@mittensmorgul](https://tmblr.co/mH08bFF21ewTCayiwIXZEOg) already being smart as usual about the connection between this and last season’s Yockey treat “Various and Sundry Villains” but I thought of it the moment I saw Harper because she looked so very much like the Plum sisters–you remember, the codependent ladies who put a love spell on Dean to steal a book and then tried to raise their mom from the dead only to have it lead to their demise at each other’s hands. Harper mentions that she’s from a long line of necromancers and, well, seems pretty plausible to me. Where the Plum sisters brought back their mom, though, Harper is looking to bring back her man (or men, if Jack is her next target) to stay with her forever. 

Just as the Plum sisters showed an unhealthy model of parent-child and sibling-sibling relationships that was allegorically appropriate to the Winchesters, Harper shows an unhealthy model of what a relationship is or could be. The Plums were unwilling to let their dead mother (or each other) go, clinging with slavish devotion to the idea of getting her, and their normal life, back. Instead of having real relationships, they cast love spells and sacrificed men (read: any possibility of a non-familial partner) to sustain it. Harper may have had a good enough relationship with Vance to start, who knows?, but she was unwilling to let him go in much the same way the Plums couldn’t let their mother die. He wanted to leave the town that she was tied to because of her family and her family business (necromancy). And instead of adhering to the idea that if you love something you should let it go she killed him and brought him back to participate in a kind of love that literally fed on other people to keep it going. Harper kept him against his will, forcing him to fit into her life in a way that required sacrificing innocent lives and kept her from being able to move on.

In both cases? It’s not love if it’s dead. Let it go.

**My boyfriend’s back and you’re gonna be in trouble** : Anyone else remember that uber-terrible 90s movie where a girl’s boyfriend came back as a zombie? No? I didn’t see it, but I recall seeing the preview in a theater and that it had a scene where they were making out and his ear fell off and it HORRIFIED me since I’d barely even heard of making out at that point. Anyway, I bet you anything Steve Yockey saw that movie which was called “my boyfriend’s back.” Harper has too many interested men, actually, which is the source of her “terrible luck” and being “perpetually single.” So, just to be clear, someone who says she’s “perpetually single” (and ready to mingle?) and has “terrible luck” with relationships is  _actually_  in a secret long-term relationship with her first love who she killed (all relationships have their issues!) and brought back from the dead as a supernatural creature who is terribly possessive of her. She wasn’t just single with terrible luck she actually had her boyfriend back!

Now, it’s not a 1-to-1 Destiel parallel and I’m not saying it is. This isn’t a flyman situation. But it’s suggestive of it anyway because all Harper’s “bad luck” with romance actually has a pretty simple explanation. She’s  _already in a relationship_. So, uh, Dean you having some trouble there? Not finding any relationships that will stick? People you show affection for maybe keep dying? Try this explanation on for size. 

**Like a romance novel** : Again, I’m not suggesting this is all 1-to-1. But following up on these other two points I’d like to point out how Harper and Vance are stereotypical of a certain kind of “first love”. They met in high school. He was a football player she was the prom queen everything was going great. Then he wanted to leave and expand their lives and she wanted to keep everything the same. So she killed him. To keep everything the same. To combat  _change_ and the unfamiliar. So that instead what she got was the familiar, reanimated and always consuming everyone around her, living when it manifestly shouldn’t. They’re a romance novel gone wrong. A  _heterosexual_  romance novel gone wrong. Because Vance, “Archie,” is a certain kind of all-American guy. 

And if you think there wasn’t some kind of symbolic resonance to the reanimated corpse of All-American masculinity beating Dean up after he got clobbered with a shelf full or romance novels, well, think again. And then Vance just…decided Dean wasn’t a threat. He just walks off and leaves him and we’re left going ??? until we learn that he’s after Jack and that, because he sees Jack as a more viable romantic threat than Dean, he needs to pursue him **.** _Dean was judged by the specter of toxic masculinity (or compulsory heterosexuality) and found wanting._ That’s kind of big, guys.

**Dick’s diner (love them, uh, Roosters)** : You guys, the monster knew that even sweet lil’ cinnamon roll Jack is more heterosexual than Dean is right now. Jack’s the one asking (repeatedly) about sex and Dean’s the one (repeatedly) not talking about it. He’s all business with the waitress, even when she tells Jack that “sometimes you just have the sex,” and even though he’s spouting a lot of wisdom about love (as someone who has obviously read one billion romance novels for “research purposes”) he’s not saying anything about what women want in the bedroom (or wherever else they want it). Even the diner, canonically the site of all Dean’s hookups with a no-bullshit waitress who e _xplicitly mentions sex_  is filled with cocks. Just…cocks everywhere. And, yeah, Dean’s going to touch some of those cocks. He can’t really help it when they’re just everywhere. And he’s NOT going to make any time for a classic diner hookup. He’s just…gonna keep staring at those cocks. (I know they are about Richard Speight directing–and certainly the diner name is a reference to that–but there is no way it’s not also about cocks. And also I make no apologies for my sense of humor here. Cocks are funny and they’ll always be funny. The end.)

**Let’s give ‘em something to talk about….how about love?**  Whew! You know who wants to talk about love? Dean Winchester. Kudos to Jensen because I felt that any conversation that had the L-word going on was heavy with Things Unsaid. Dean distracting Zombie Archie by trying to talk to him about what love really is but stopping short just  _after_  saying “that’s not what love is…c’mon, think about it” but  _before_  saying what it was instead? Dean saying that people do a lot crazier things for love (see my [long crack rant](https://dimples-of-discontent.tumblr.com/post/180157413996/dean-talking-about-the-complications-of-being-in) about just what those kind of things might be DEAN)? I was legitimately kind of prepared for Jack to ask Dean a question about love and Dean to give a revealing answer that allowed Jack to serve as a GA proxy and go “Holy shit! You love Castiel!”. 

But hey, next week they’re apparently going to road trip to Vegas and Jack is going to drive the Impala (BEFORE CAS??? BLASPHEMY!!) so maybe there’s still going to be some time to callback to Sam’s Vegas wedding and how you know you want to marry someone. 

My apologies to Sam and Charlie, whose plotline I did very much enjoy, but I’ve tired myself out. This was pure joy and I feel happy and well fed and, well, optimistic…which can only mean dark times to come because nothing good ever happens on SPN. Take care, lovelies, and stay away from necromancy!


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